Monday, February 13, 2012

No spin here– not even editorial commentary. Instead, we’re going to take a look at the facts and only the facts in this article today and allow you to draw your own conclusions, form your opinions, and discuss and debate them in the comment thread below. A candidate’s top contributors by company and by industry are publicly available knowledge as FEC rules require candidates to disclose this information quarterly. You can access these data and more at a fantastic political resource called OpenSecrets.org. When a company is listed below, it does not necessarily mean the company itself donated to the candidates, but that the company’s employees did.

I’ve put this list together because an informed electorate should scrutinize just which companies’ and industries’ employees believe which candidate best serves their interests. These are reliable data that can reveal a lot about a political candidate and affect a voter’s assessment of that candidate. For our purposes today, we’ll be examining the 2012 presidential field and the information below is current as of the publication of this article, but always feel free to peruse OpenSecrets yourself to learn more about any politician by doing what is so obvious that it has become a cliche– follow the money: